Electing leaders rather than appointing them

Given that in most walks of life we elect leaders with a democratic vote it is odd that in the business world we do the opposite. A select few, usually with a self interest to protect their own position, appoint managers below them.

We’ve been experimenting with electing team leaders. We’ve incorporated an element of reasoned voting into our annual goal review process to determine who should lead within our company.

This has several benefits:

1. Leaders are elected and not appointed so every employee is on a level playing field.

2. If anyone has aspirations of leadership they simply have to earn the respect of their peers.

Posted by Tim Fouracre

Tim founded Clear Books in 2008. Like many small business owners he worked from home for 15 months to get his startup off the ground. Today Tim enjoys helping Clear Books, its customers and its growing team innovate and achieve. Tim did his GCE O Levels in Ghana.

In fact I would say we’ve been incrementally building up the transparency. So rather than a host of changes at once we’ve been introducing ideas like sharing our financial data with the whole team and electing the leadership team.

Please drop a link to the Conscious Business meetups – it does sound interesting and very relevant to my posts.